The Envoy: The Epic Rescue of the Last Jews of Europe in the Desperate Closing Months of World War II

by Alex Kershaw

  According to researcher Susanne Berger, who has spent many years investigating Wallenberg’s fate: “Fredrik and Maj von Dardel faced an impossible situation: While the Swedish government asked them to provide credible evidence for their son’s presence in the Soviet Union after 1945, it refused them full access to all witness testimonies and documentation in the case, citing government secrecy laws.”5

  Five years passed and still Wallenberg’s parents did not know what had happened to their son. On October 24, 1952, Raoul’s stepfather wrote in his diary: “Raoul Wallenberg’s fate has lain like a dark cloud over our existence.” Both parents railed against the Swedish Foreign Ministry, which they believed had so cruelly abandoned their son. The strain of not knowing what had happened to him must have been immense. They reportedly withdrew socially, playing solitaire and painting in the few hours when they weren’t trying to find him.6 Increasingly, they felt ostracized from polite Stockholm society. “People are afraid to talk to me about Raoul,” Maj admitted, “but they are also afraid not to talk to me about the one subject which I live for. So, really, it’s much easier for them just to avoid me.”7 Their son’s heroism was inspiring but also perhaps an uncomfortable reminder of how most of his countrymen, unlike their neighbors in Norway, had been content to stand by and do nothing as the world at their borders disappeared into flames.

  SIXTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD Fredrik von Dardel sat at a table in his living room. One day in March 1956, his seventy-one-year-old wife, Maj, watched as he wrote neatly in blue ink on a white piece of paper. Maj was seated by a telephone near a green-marble chest cabinet, where a picture of twenty-four-year-old Raoul stood beside some flowers.

  Husband and wife were preparing a letter for Sweden’s prime minister to hand to his counterpart in Moscow.

  Dear beloved Raoul,

  After many years of despair and terrible longing for you, we have finally reached the point where the heads of the coalition government, Prime Minister Erlander and Minister Hedlund, are going to Moscow to ensure that you will be allowed to return home. May they be successful, and may your suffering finally be at an end. We have never given up hope of seeing you again, even though all our efforts to contact you up to now, to our great regret and sorrow, have been in vain. The 11 years that have passed since your disappearance have been filled with despair night and day, but we have been sustained by the hope of one day seeing you among us and again being able to kiss you and hold your hands and hear your beloved voice . . . There is a room here waiting for you when you return with the prime minister.8

  Erlander arrived at the Kremlin that April and was soon shown into a room, where he faced Premier Nikolai Bulganin, Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, and sixty-two-year-old party secretary Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s boorish successor. Khrushchev would be best remembered in the West for taking off a shoe and banging it on a podium, like some frenzied peasant, at the United Nations in 1960.

  Erlander reportedly tried to impress on the three Soviets, the most powerful men in the communist world, why Sweden regarded the Wallenberg case as important. Khrushchev and Molotov listened to Erlander as he pulled documents from his briefcase. But then Bulganin accused Erlander of bringing up the case to harm relations between the Soviet Union and Sweden.

  “This is a waste of time!” he shouted. “We don’t have time for this kind of nonsense!”

  “If you won’t even accept the material that I have brought,” Erlander replied, “how can you be so sure that this whole affair is a falsification, an unimportant sideshow cooked up to embarrass you?”

  “I don’t want to hear any more of this!” shouted Bulganin.

  Erlander stood his ground.

  “At the very least I must demand that you accept this material and appoint someone you trust to investigate it. If you refuse, I’ll end my visit now. I won’t go to the south of your country as planned; I won’t visit the atomic power facility you have so wanted me to see.”

  Khrushchev took the file of documents Erlander had brought on the Wallenberg case.

  Bulganin then told Erlander: “It’s a great pity that we have to waste so much time on an affair such as this; however, as a gesture of our goodwill toward Sweden, we will accede to your request that we accept this material about Wallenberg, and we will appoint someone to examine it. You will have our reply as soon as possible.”9

  The Soviets took their time replying. Almost a year later, on February 6, 1957, Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko gave a memorandum to Swedish Ambassador Sohlman in Moscow:At the request of the government of the kingdom of Sweden, the competent Soviet authorities were charged with undertaking a thorough examination of the Wallenberg file received by the Soviet Foreign Ministry from Sweden in March, April, and May 1956. As a result, the authorities studied the archives for the registration of prisoners. They also examined the reports of interrogations, looking for a sign of the presence of Raoul Wallenberg. Similarly, they questioned those who may have been concerned in the circumstances mentioned in the Swedish dossier. No one interrogated recognized the name of Wallenberg. None of these efforts provided the smallest indication that Raoul Wallenberg had spent time in the Soviet Union.

  However, in the course of their research, the Soviet authorities had the occasion to examine the files of prison infirmaries. They discovered in Lubianka a handwritten report which may refer to Wallenberg. This report is addressed to Abakumov, minister for state hospital service. It is dated July 17, 1947; “I am writing to inform you that the prisoner Walenberg [sic], known to you, died suddenly in his cell last night. He was apparently the victim of myocardiac infarctus [heart attack]. In view of your instructions to me to supervise Walenberg personally, I ask you to let me know who should conduct the autopsy to ascertain the cause of death. 17 July 1947. Signed: Smoltsov, Colonel, Chief of the Prison Infirmary.” The same report contains a second manuscript note from Smoltsov: “Informed the minister personally. Order given to cremate the body without autopsy. 17 July 1947.”

  Smoltsov died on May 7, 1953. The above-mentioned facts lead one to conclude that Wallenberg died in July 1947. Evidently he was arrested, like many others, by the Russian Army in the area of fighting. That he was later detained in prison and that false information was given about him to the Foreign Ministry by the chief of state security over a number of years is one aspect of the criminal activity of Abakumov. As is well known, the latter was sentenced by the Supreme Court of Justice and executed for serious crimes.

  The Soviet Union expresses its sincere regret in relation to these circumstances and assures the government of the kingdom of Sweden, and the family of Raoul Wallenberg, of its profound sympathy.10

  RAOUL WALLENBERG’S PARENTS were not inclined to believe a word of Gromyko’s communiqué. They persisted in their search, buoyed by several alleged sightings of their son in the gulag, through the sixties and well into the next decade. But still they found no hard evidence that their son was alive, despite the best efforts over the years of such high-profile supporters as Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal (“If before I die, I could embrace my own beloved son, this is all I ask,” Maj had written to him); oil magnate Armand Hammer, who enjoyed back-channel relations with Brezhnev; Alexander Solzhenitsyn, dissident author of the greatest indictment of the gulag, The Gulag Archipelago; and nuclear physicist Albert Einstein, who had written to Stalin in 1947. (Stalin had reassured Einstein that he knew nothing about Wallenberg’s whereabouts.)11

  The Swedish government did not make the parents’ search for their son any easier. In 1976, Fredrik von Dardel asked for all the documentation in his son’s case to be made public. Instead, Sweden passed a law, according to the Wallenberg researcher Susanne Berger, “which simply shortened the then-valid fifty-year secrecy requirement to thirty years—rendering most of the relevant material still inaccessible. This included important information about other Swedes in Soviet captivity after 1945. Without this documentation, a proper evaluation of Wallenberg’s fate became almost impossible.�
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  On February 6, 1978, a Swedish official visited Wallenberg’s parents and later noted in his diary: “A very painful meeting with these two old people . . . That he is alive is taken for granted.”

  That April of 1978, Raoul’s stepfather ended his journal, begun in 1956, with two words in English: “stone wall.”13

  Frustrated and exhausted, the parents finally could take no more heartbreak. In 1979, after decades of looking in vain for their son, they took their own lives. On February 12, Raoul’s ninety-three-year-old stepfather died in his bed from an overdose of sleeping pills. According to the Wall Street Journal: “Raoul Wallenberg’s mother, again widowed, lay on her sofa two days later and swallowed an overdose of barbiturates. [Their daughter] Nina Lagergren arrived shortly after. Her mother, still alive, asked Nina to promise that she and [her brother] Guy would keep fighting for their older brother—and presume him living, as she had long instructed, until 2000. Nina gave her word.”14

  Eighty-seven-year-old Jacob Wallenberg—Raoul’s godfather and cousin—attended the funeral for Raoul’s mother and father. “[Raoul’s] childhood hero,” the journalist Kati Marton later reported, “spent an unusually long time taking his leave of the couple’s twin coffins. Some who were present felt Jacob was apologizing to them for his many years of indifference.” 15

  Jacob died the following year.

  RAOUL’S SIBLINGS CARRIED ON the search after their parents’ deaths, hoping that in some corner of the Soviet gulag their brother might still be alive. Nina found some comfort in meeting people whom her brother had saved, including Vera Herman and Alice Breuer. “I felt a very strong emotional sensation looking at these lovely people,” she recalled, “all so deeply committed in wanting to pay their debt to their savior.”16

  Around the world, Wallenberg’s deeds had not been forgotten. Tens of thousands of survivors longed to know what had happened to the man who had saved them. Many now lived in America, having fled repression in their native Hungary. In 1979, California resident Tom Lantos ran for Congress and was elected. Lantos had escaped from a forced labor camp and had hidden in Budapest under Swedish protection. He had then escaped Hungary in 1947 after protesting against communism. He and his Hungarian wife, Annette, whose father was murdered by the Arrow Cross, were determined to honor, if not find, their savior. One of Lantos’s first actions as a congressman was to introduce a bill making Raoul Wallenberg an honorary citizen of the United States. The bill passed the House of Representatives by 396 to 2 and through the Senate unanimously.

  At just after 2:30 p.m. on October 5, 1981, at a White House ceremony attended by Nina Lagergren and her brother, Guy von Dardel, President Ronald Reagan eulogized their lost brother.

  “Raoul Wallenberg is the Swedish savior of almost one hundred thousand Jewish men, women, and children,” said Reagan. “What he did, what he accomplished, was of biblical proportions. Wherever he is, his humanity burns like a torch. Sir Winston Churchill, another man of force and fortitude, is the only other person who has received honorary U.S. citizenship.”

  Reagan then added: “I heard someone say that a man has made at least a start in understanding the meaning of human life when he plants shade trees under which he knows he will never sit. Raoul Wallenberg is just such a man. He nurtured the lives of those he never knew at the risk of his own. And then just recently, I was told that in a special area behind the [Yad Vashem] Holocaust Memorial in Israel, Hungarian Jews now living in Sweden planted ten thousand trees in Raoul’s honor.”

  Reagan turned to face Nina Lagergren and her brother.

  “Mrs. Lagergren. Mr. von Dardel,” said Reagan. “We’re going to do everything in our power so that your brother can sit beneath the shade of those trees and enjoy the respect and love so many held for him.”17

  REAGAN’S SPEECH AND the very public recognition of Wallenberg’s achievements at the White House encouraged many to believe that a breakthrough in the Wallenberg case might materialize. Surely the Soviets would respond to Reagan’s statements with new details, perhaps even by releasing Wallenberg as an act of détente? But the months passed, the cold war stretched on, and Wallenberg’s fate remained its most exasperating mystery.

  Then, at last, there was an astonishing development. In 1989, after the Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet ambassador in Sweden called Raoul’s brother and sister to a meeting in the Soviet embassy in Stockholm. The Soviets apparently wanted to close the book on Wallenberg, once and for all, and they invited the siblings to Moscow.

  Glasnost was in full force. Doors finally seemed to be opening. Survivors talked of Wallenberg being freed. Vera Herman and others in the United States hosted a party for Nina in New Jersey that year, before she and her brother headed to Moscow at the invitation of the Russian foreign ministry.

  On October 16, brother and sister stood in an office in the KGB headquarters in Moscow and watched a Soviet official place a wooden box before them.18 It contained all that the Soviets could find, they said, of their brother’s belongings, taken from him in 1945: the address book with Adolf Eichmann’s three telephone numbers, a cigarette case, his diplomatic passport, and stacks of Hungarian banknotes and U.S. dollars. “To hold those things in my hand,” recalled Nina, “was both a wonderful and a painful thing . . . a deeply emotional moment.”

  But she was not convinced that the Russians had revealed everything. “In that system, although people disappeared frequently, it didn’t happen without any record being kept,” she later said. “They must show us the proof, open up the files, be honest with us. For fifty years we have been trying to learn the truth, and it still lies out there somewhere.”19

  During the 1989 visit, a Soviet Foreign Ministry spokesman, Grennadi I. Gerasimov, apologized to Nina and her brother for his country’s “tragic mistake.”

  “Your brother was swept up in the maelstrom of repression,” he added.

  The message from other officials was essentially the same as before: Wallenberg had died in 1947.

  “We simply don’t believe them,” Nina told journalists in Moscow during the visit. “We are convinced our brother is still alive in a prison here.”20

  Back in America, even though cold war tensions were easing, those rescued by Wallenberg were bitterly disappointed by the outcome of the trip. “We had sent Nina off, saying ‘bring him back to us,’” recalled Vera Herman. “Instead of her brother, she got a brown paper bag with his belongings in it.”21

  Brother and sister returned to Sweden, none the wiser as to what had happened to their brother, and carried on their soul-destroying search.

  Guy Von Dardel was now obsessed. He even commissioned an FBI sketch of what his brother would look like at age eighty. He traveled to Russia fifteen times in 1994 alone, suffering scabies and hypothermia.22

  THE YEAR 1994 ALSO SAW the publication of a sensational memoir, Special Tasks, by eighty-seven-year-old Pavel Anatolyevich Sudoplatov, a lieutenant general in the Soviet intelligence service. Sudoplatov had been closely involved with the assassination of Stalin’s bitter enemy, Leon Trotksy, and other highly secret operations during the Cold War. He had served in the KGB for more than fifty years, and at one time, he claimed, had controlled “more than twenty thousand guerillas, moles, and spies.”

  In Special Tasks, Sudoplatov argued that the Soviets tried to recruit Wallenberg as an agent, “to operate either with his family or with the Swedish government.23 His interrogators may have bullied him with charges that he was a Gestapo informer or an American agent, but that was not the intention from the top. The goal was to recruit him.”24 But, by July 1947, they had made no progress. “Wallenberg had refused to cooperate and he was eliminated at the same time the leadership continued to tell the Swedes that they knew nothing of his fate.”

  Sudoplatov speculated that “Wallenberg was [probably] taken to a super-secret cell in the commandant’s section of the ministry, a location monitored personally by [Grigori] Maironovsky as chief of the toxicological laboratory. My bes
t estimate is that Wallenberg was killed by Maironovsky, who was ordered to inject him with poison under the guise of medical treatment. According to witnesses who told me the story, Wallenberg was kept in the second block of the jail, where medical checkups and injections were routine for prisoners.”25

  One of the reasons why Sudoplatov believed that Wallenberg was poisoned was that his body was cremated without an autopsy: “An autopsy would have revealed the exact nature of his death. The regulations were that those executed under special government decisions were cremated without autopsy at the Donskoi cemetery crematorium and their ashes buried in a common grave.”26

  If Sudoplatov’s thesis is correct, the remains of one of the twentieth century’s greatest humanitarians are buried alongside those of one of its most depraved sociopaths—Lavrentiy Beria, the former head of the NKVD, who carried out Stalin’s greatest purges, sending hundreds of thousands to their deaths.27 Arguably the greatest hero of the Holocaust had become the most famous victim of a Stalinist terror that between 1929 and 1953 claimed well over two million lives.28

  IN HIS QUEST TO FIND HIS BROTHER, Guy von Dardel would eventually sacrifice all his savings and his health. Although doctors could not work out at first why he became ill, his daughter Louise did: “The illness is Raoul Wallenberg illness.”29

  In 2000, the year their mother had told them would finally be the time to accept that Raoul was dead, Guy von Dardel and Nina Lagergren both decided that they in fact could not do so. They continued, despite old age and dwindling resources, to campaign for more information and to speak out about what they saw as the Swedish government’s cold indifference to their brother’s fate.